An IBM perspective: Cloud hosting

From an IT perspective, the flexibility of rapid solution deployment for an evolving business need is critical both to the client and the service provider. In an established environment with a long history of IT implementations, it is not easy to deploy a new solution within weeks without affecting the existing infrastructure or the available funding in a big way. Cloud hosting provides the options and advantages of quicker solution deployment and lower cost of implementation and operations.

Suj Perepa
IBM Software Client Architect

Organizations today have enough experience with cloud hosting to prefer it to traditionally deploying their applications. It is not only quicker to deploy on cloud, but it also ensures the scalability, availability, and performance needs of the deployment.

Cloud service providers (and there are many) have also matured their services and service delivery models and are able to deliver service-level agreements (SLAs) with much more certainty and success. Cloud hosting systems have evolved to provide simplified and centralized IT services and management capabilities. This approach to centralized administration aids both the service provider and users in defining, delivering, and tracking SLAs automatically on the web. Most cloud hosting services are provided through an easy-to-use, web-based user interface for software, hardware, and service requests, which are instantaneously delivered. Even the software and hardware updates can happen automatically. It is as easy as online shopping!

In both in-house and cloud hosting approaches, the non-functional requirements of scalability, reliability, and high availability remain the same, but cloud hosting provides a much broader pool of IT resources to deliver the scalability, reliability, and availability, and with a higher degree of confidence. These requirements can also be automatically tuned to one’s solution requirements. This is known as application-aware service provisioning, which is implemented through software-defined environments (SDE). SDE automatically and dynamically provisions the compute, network, and storage resources to your application needs. It helps with maximizing efficiencies and optimizing services, a win-win for both users and the service provider.

Cloud hosting thus remains to be a prominent deployment option for clients of all industries. If you are not already there, now is a perfect time to consider it a strategic option and get on board with cloud hosting.

Cloud hosting from IBM can help you share your content and only pay for the resources you use